The family-history project Ed discussed on Giant Robots.
Get the free course, the free skill, and early word on what comes next.
Everything on this page is free. The seven-email course and the Claude skill cost nothing and ask for nothing beyond your email address. Join the waitlist below if you want to hear when the paid kit opens.
The free course
Seven short emails, sent over ten days, teaching the free-records route before anything else.
- Day 0: The free-records map. Your first email lays out where Britain's free birth, marriage, death, census and parish records actually live. You will not be guessing which site to try first.
- Day 1: FreeBMD in fifteen minutes. A short walkthrough that ends with you holding a real civil registration reference, found for free.
- Day 3: The census, honestly. What FreeCEN actually covers, where its gaps are, and how a library card can fill some of them through Ancestry Library Edition.
- Day 5: When to pay. A plain guide to GRO certificates. What each format costs, what it can tell you, and how to decide whether a record is worth buying.
- Day 7: Why AI invents ancestors. The credibility email. It explains folklore laundering, the labels VERIFIED, INFERRED and UNCONFIRMED, and the checklist to run before publishing anything to a shared tree.
- Day 9: One family on a map. A case study from Ed's own archive, built from 150 years of one family's addresses. It includes a misread word that changed an occupation, and a photograph that did not show who everyone hoped it did.
- Day 10: What comes next. The free skill, in full, plus an honest look at the £99 kit and £249 guided option now on the waitlist.
One email every day or two, then an occasional letter worth reading. Unsubscribe any time. We never share your address.
The free download
The free Tin Chest skill is a folder of instructions for Claude. Once you add it, Claude keeps a careful written record of your research. It notes where each fact came from, keeps a guess separate from a checked fact, and never quietly turns one into the other.
It needs Claude on the web or desktop app, with "Code execution and file creation" turned on in Settings, then Capabilities. It does not work on the mobile app.
Nothing leaves your computer except what you choose to paste into Claude. The skill's files, your notes and your sources stay in your own folders throughout.
Before you continue
Turn off "Help Improve our AI models" in your Claude account's Privacy settings before you use it. Our privacy guide shows you exactly where.
We email you the download link and nothing else. See Privacy.